App Engine: Host Your Apps with Google — Tonight at their second CampFireOne Google Code is announcing App Engine, a hosted platform for web developers. The actual service will launch later tonight in a closed Beta. 10,000 developers will be granted access on a first come, first serve basis.

Google hopes to house Web software on App Engine — Google plans to launch a service called App Engine Monday evening that the company hopes will attract programmers and eventually companies needing an expandable foundation for online applications. — App Engine, free to the first 10,000 people …

Google App Engine readies for brawl with Amazon — For all the rivals Google is making as it continues to expand into nearly every facet of the Internet, Amazon has thus far remained one fellow power relatively unscathed. That is about to change. Tonight, the search giant …

Google Engine: Competitor or knock-off? — Call it a clash of competing clouds. It seems that Google is launching an application-hosting service that appears to be going head-to-head with Amazon's trio of distributed computing services — the EC2 computing network, the S3 storage service …

Foreclosures Shown On Scary, Encroaching Heat Maps — If you want to see in stark colors exactly how the mortgage credit crisis is spreading across the country, go to real estate search site HotPads and look at the foreclosure heat maps in your area. These are map mashups that take foreclosure data …

Search engines warned over data — Search engines should delete personal data held about their users within six months, a European Commission advisory body on data protection has said. — The recommendation is likely to be accepted by the European Commission and could lead to a clash with search giants like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The Future of Travel Search — My feature story today on PCMag.com, Web Sites for Cheap Flights, has 10 sites worth checking out if you're planning on flying somewhere in the near future. I'm actually planning a trip myself right now, so I know the headache of schlepping from site to site in search of the best price.

Windows Vista SP1 Prerequisite KB937287 — Back in February, we posted about the release of a couple of prerequisites for Windows Vista Service Pack 1. While several million customers installed the updates successfully, you may have read that a few customers experienced an endless reboot cycle …

TechCrunch, VentureBeat in merger talks — We hear Michael Arrington is in advanced talks to acquire VentureBeat, a smaller tech blog which, like Arrington's TechCrunch, is trying to expand from the niche of covering startups. When Arrington issued a rant about the dangers …

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